arctic sea ice

Tag archives for arctic sea ice

The surface ice in the Arctic has been melting to historic low levels every year for the last several years. The graph above shows the first ten years in the National Snow & Ice Data Center records, meant to indicate what Arctic Sea Ice “normally” does as it melts off during the northern warm months.…

Arctic sea ice decline happened faster than expected. This has the effect of accelerating global warming because less of the Sun’s energy is reflected back into space by ice. Northern Hemisphere snow also sends some of that energy back into space. The amount of snow cover we have is also declining. The warming of the…

Arctic Sea Ice extent continues to be a problem. This year, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, ARctic Sea ice reached its lowest extent this year on September 17th, which is about the sixth lowest extent on record, following a multi-year trend of decline. There is variation from year to year. This…

The Arctic Sea is covered with ice during the winter, and some of it melts off every summer. Over recent years the amount of melt has been increasing. This is the time of year we may want to look at Arctic Sea ice because by late September it has reached its annual minimum and is…

As it does every summer, the Arctic Sea ice is melting off. Over the last several years, the amount of sea ice that melts by the time it hits minimum in September has generally been increasing. So, how’s it doing now? The graph above shows the 1981-2010 average plus or minus two standard deviations. Before…

Earth’s northern ice cap is heating up and melting down at an alarming, not previously predicted, rate. A paper just out in Wiley Interndisciplary Reviews: Climate Change, by Josefino Comiso and Dorothy Hall looks at recent historic transformations in the Arctic using satellite imagery, mainly from 1979 to the present. The decline of Arctic ice…

I’m going to update this graph every now and then. There are 12 lines on this graph. The colorful squiggles up along the top are the first ten years of Arctic Sea ice extent for the period for which we have really good data. So this is 1979 – 1988. There is reason to believe…

A few days ago I made a prediction for this year’s minimum Arctic Sea Ice extent. That’s still valid. Or not. Either way, it’s still my prediction. But looking at the ice over the last few days, we see that for the first time in a while the extent of ice estimated by the NSICD…

During the northern Winter, much of the Arctic is covered with sea ice. Some of this ice melts during the summer, then it regrows. Over recent years, the amount of ice loss in the summer has tended to increase, almost every year, year after year. In 2012 the loss of sea ice was extreme, falling…